The Rise of Family Channels on YouTube: Are they ethical?
Exploitative or Harmless?
Family Channels are a popular form of vlogging (video blogging) channel on YouTube, featuring content centred around the day-to-day lives of the children and parents. However, the discourse around the ethical issues in the industry is becoming increasingly prominent, particularly online (see image above, screenshots of YouTube thumbnails) e.g., child labour, the privacy of the children and the negative effects viewing these ‘perfect’ families can have on their young audience.
YouTube guidelines do not coincide with the established child labour laws in the UK and US designed to protect traditional child stars such as child actors e.g., restrictions on work hours and income for the child. Riggio (2021) believes that this is a failure in the protection of child YouTube personalities from labour exploitation as they are essentially ‘employees of the internet’. Furthermore, children are the main appeal of a Family Channel therefore the family becomes reliant on the kids for household income, this puts immense pressure on the children and could create unhealthy and misdirected parent-child relationships.
Secondly, displaying a child’s life on the internet raises ethical issues of privacy. For example, ‘Its R Life’ posted a video featuring a child swimsuit try-on haul; the older daughter Evie, age 15 at the time, was clearly uncomfortable and reluctant to show her body in the swimsuit online yet the mother insisted and proceeded to post the video to their channel with over 1 million subscribers. This is both a breach of the child’s privacy and safety as showing her underage daughter in a swimsuit online could attract a paedophilic audience.
Another example of infringing on a child’s privacy can be seen in the channel ‘Raising Autumn’, the channel follows the mother’s experience of raising Autumn (an autistic child) along with her other two children. Some videos feature Autumn’s ‘meltdowns’ one of which surrounding her period (a personal subject). I would describe posting videos of children’s tantrums online as unfair as you are showing the child in a state that they may find embarrassing in the future.
Finally, Family Channels can also have negative effects on their audiences; these channels attract a predominantly child demographic due to the age relatability between the viewer and the children of the family. Research shows that consuming social media causes social comparisons which lead to a decreased life satisfaction and self-esteem. In other words, children view the content and only see the positive parts of the family life that the creators choose to post. This causes them to reflect negatively on their own life and family due to the unrealistic expectations they have taken from the content. This will have negative effects on their mental health and life satisfaction.
In conclusion, despite the harmless implications of the title Family Channels, they raise ethical issues for the children starring in the content in the forms of labour exploitation and lack of privacy, as well as a negative impact on the mental health of the viewers.
